Newsmax's Hirsen Still Spinning Election-Fraud Conspiracy Theories Topic: Newsmax
Smirky Newsmax columnist James Hirsen has become quite enamored of bogus right-wing election-fraud conspiracies, and that hasn't really stopped. We've noted his Dec. 7 column likening the election to a bank heist, but he's done more of that.
In his Dec. 14 column, Hirsen lashed out at the Supreme Court justices who refuse to take up the highly dubious Texas lawsuit trying to intervene in the elections of other states:
To the heartbreak of millions of Americans who were hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court would give justice a fighting chance in the current fog of electoral war, seven of the nine members of the High Court simply slunk away last Friday without even lending an ear.
Approximately one week ago, shortly before midnight, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit directly with the high court.
In that suit, Texas challenged the election procedures that had taken place in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The seven members of the high court, who took the position that Texas and the other co-plaintiff states would not be allowed to have their case heard, committed a fundamental error.
The justices may have been influenced by a slew of legal prognosticators, some of whom had taken to the Democratic-dominated media to ridicule the Texas attorney general for having initiated the action in the first place.
[...]
The threshold issue that was before the Supreme Court was whether the constitutional prescription for the selection of electors had been violated by non-legislative actors.
This was, and will always remain, central to the functioning of our republic, and it is a premise that is vitally important for all of the justices to recognize.
Seven simply did not.
These wayward seven failed to allow the case to move forward.
In his Dec. 28 column, Hirsen ranted about Americans allegedly being victims of intelligence-style PSYOP tactics over the election:
There has been a concerted effort to perpetuate two falsehoods: first, the claim that no such evidence of election fraud exists; the second, the repeated mantra that the election is "over" and everyone needs to "move on."
The first falsehood supports the fallacious premise that the 2020 presidential election was conducted in a legitimate manner. It was not.
Even former Attorney General William Barr, among others, admitted that there was fraud.
The second falsehood seeks to sweep the rigged election under the rug.
The nation cannot.
The Republic ceases to exist without free and fair elections.
At present, approximately half of the country believes that the election was conducted in an illegitimate manner.
These are the folks who are not just distrustful of the way the election was conducted.
They are the folks who have lost trust in their government; lost trust in their elected officials; lost trust in the complicit news media; lost trust in the social media; lost trust in the tech companies; and on and on.
No doubt, the use of PSYOP on an unsuspecting public played a major role in the vanquishing of their trust.
However, this type of undermining typically leads to cynicism, which can be unhealthy for an individual and fatal to a society.
But Hirsen is engaged in his own PSYOP here. His goal as a right-wing activist is to instill that distrust in people for the benefit of Trump -- otherwise, why would he spend the past two months ranting about how the election was stolen from Trump, something he would know is not true if he had ever bothered to closely examine the evidence?
Hirsen wants people to be distrustful of government and the media and to be cynical about the state of things. That's his job. That's what Newsmax pays him to do.
At Last, WND Launches Its Daily Caller-Clone Nonprofit Reporting Operation Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember the WND News Center, that clone of the Daily Caller News Foundation whose main function is to offload WND's reporting operation (or what was left of it, anyway) to a nonprofit organization that would allow WND to publish its content for free (as long as other people could as well)? It appears that -- after getting announced back in February 2019, it has finally happened. Joseph Farah announced it in his Dec. 22 column -- but not, of course, establishing a sob story behind its creation in which he played victim and served up a little of his health history over the past couple of years:
I've been more or less absent from the scene for a little over 18 months. Some of you know what happened to me. I was working really hard trying to save this journalistic experiment from the plague of the Tech Giants. They destroyed our advertising revenues through underhanded, dishonest and monopolistic means we've been documenting for years, which caused our annual revenues to plunge from $15 million to $1 million. Staff had to be cut to a bare minimum. We had to stop publishing books and producing movies – two of our big successes for years.
Then I had to drop out myself from the race because of a series of massive strokes from November 2018 to March 2019.
Call me a casualty of Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which launched this massive "indecency" by giving the Tech Giants a waiver from the lawsuits that tend to plague journalism sites – even though their brazen "editing" and "censoring" of news and viewpoints they don't like makes them de facto journalists, not simply "neutral platforms" like AT&T and Verizon, as they claim. Their mega-monopoly status has also made Google and Facebook advertising behemoths – landlords to what remains of the press. The Tech Giants promote reporting they like, namely that with a progressive-left slant, while censoring and suppressing independent, honest, hard-hitting reporting like ours.
The carnage started shortly after the arrival of President Trump. My public pleading could not stop it. It was a massacre. Frankly, we're fortunate anything is left of WND. No one was hit harder.
Needless to say, Farah is not going to tell the full truth -- that its business model of publishing falsehoods and conspiracy theories failed and, given that little has changed about WND's editorial operation since then, raises questions about whether WND even deserves to live.
(Also: if the book and movie operations were "big successes," there was no reason to shut them down, since "success" typically equates with generating profits. The fact they were shut down tells us they weren't moneymakers.)
From there, it was time to self-promote (and, of course, beg for money):
Allow me to introduce you to the WND News Center – the reader-supported, tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit that is giving birth to an optimistic, credible, fearless and uncompromisingly truth-oriented news entity in a sea of fake news, propaganda and disinformation.
The original vision and hopes we have long had for WorldNetDaily are still intact at your favorite news site, WND.com. But those ideals are now shared by our sister organization, an intrepid new journalism nonprofit called the WND News Center. Approved by the IRS as a public charity, the WND News Center is committed to making its journalistic output freely available for publication by other news organizations. Many believe the nonprofit route is the wave of the future in American journalism, where the traditional advertising-based business model has been largely destroyed by Big Tech.
Freedom's not going away in America. It's here to stay. Allow me to make a plea that my selfless partner, David Kupelian, has often written in my absence: Please give generously to the WND News Center and help rejuvenate a truly free press in America!
While the WND News Center is finally off the ground, it's not offering too much so far -- as the website shows, the available content is just article rewrites by the few remaining WND writers like Bob Unruh and Art Moore, as well as WND-exclusive columnists. Those articles on the WND website proper now have tags stating that "Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience."
Farah might want to watch himself, though. The Daily Caller model he's clearly following -- ironically, WND publishes a lot of Daily Caller News Foundation content -- has brought complaints that the nonprofit is improperly funding the for-profit operation and have engaged in political activity that clashes with the foundation's nonprofit status. Right-wing financier Charles Koch is a major bankroller of the DCNF.
On the other hand, the fact that the WND News Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit means that it has to file tax reports that reveal how much money it raises and from whom, as well as what it spends on salaries and other expenses -- all of which must be made public. That might be a little much for the secrecy-loving Farah (whose strokes shortly after the announcement of the News Center, if you'll recall, weren't publicly revealed until the Washington Post sought comment on an expose it was working on about WND's financial shenanigans).
Whether or not Farah's health issues caused it, WND has been very slow on the uptake in doing basic things to shore up its fragile finances. It wasn't until November that WND got around to setting up a subscription option, after wasting precious time on things like giving away sketchy cybercurrency. WND's management has not changed in the interim -- meaning that the way WND is run and the policies it follows are not changing in any significant way -- and it's to the point where all of the last-minute fixing being done here may be too little, too late.
But how much money will donors ultimately kick in? This is content by the same people whose work has already been discredited and rejected by the public. Why would anyone outside WND want to pay for the privilege of generating it when there's no return on it?
MRC Defends Proud Boys Supporter To Own The Libs, Or Something Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Alexander Hall complained in a Nov. 20 post:
American band TRAPT was reportedly booted from Facebook for sharing a meme.
“Nu-metal one hit wonders Trapt were kicked off of Facebook after the group shared a Proud Boy meme to promote their new account on social media site Parler,” Newsweek reported Nov. 19. Alternative-rock band Trapt had tweeted: “For posting this pic and saying the same thing in the post, Facebook has completely deleted the TRAPT FB account.” The official Trapt account then declared: “I will be suing Facebook.” Trapt was the nu-metal one-hit-wonder band known for the song “Headstrong” in 2002.
Hall went on to complain that "Facebook’s moves to restrict activist groups in the name of preventing unrest have appeared to be completely partisan in nature." Of course, the Proud Boys are not just an "activist group"; they're violent thugs with a white supremacist and anti-Semitic bent.
But a couple weeks later, Trapt 'sTwitter account got banned. Why? This is why:
The nine-month hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck has come to a screeching halt. Trapt’s Twitter account was finally suspended after frontman Chris Taylor Brown vehemently defended underage sexual encounters between teenage boys and adult women.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the planet, Chris Taylor Brown became one of the most inflammatory users on Twitter by defending President Trump’s COVID response, blaming George Floyd for his own death, threatening to fight or sue countless Twitter users, supporting neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and more.
Brown’s Proud Boys support got Trapt removed from Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter didn’t take action until the musician began publicly defending statutory rape.
“A 15 year male and a 25 year old female is not pedophilia, you fucking moron,” Brown later tweeted. “I wouldn’t care if a 15 year old boy banged his 25 year old teacher. That’s it…”
“I would be giving the kid high fives!” Brown continued in yet another tweet. “Only if the teacher was hot though… So much worse when a grown man does that with a 14 year old girl. They get much tougher prison sentences, so society agrees with me. As long as the kid wasn’t sad about it. I mean the teacher could break his heart and that would be sad.”
Hall isn't going to tell you what Trapt did to get banned from Twitter, since that doesn't fit with his dishonest agenda. But this is the crowd Hall and the MRC are associating with.
(At least Hall conceded that Trapt was a "nu-metal one-hit-wonder.")
Scott Lively's Anti-Vaccine Rant Topic: WorldNetDaily
One of the most troubling questions about our very near future as Americans is whether our state or the federal government will mandate a COVID-19 vaccine – either by a clear government dictate like the lockdown policies or by coercive measures in cooperation with leftist-controlled private companies to make refusal to "voluntarily" vaccinate so onerous as to force compliance.
The prospect is all the more troubling given what we already know about vaccine puppet-master Bill Gates' Malthusian agenda and its vaccine-based biometric tagging of human beings for tracking purposes (though there is no indication so far that this would include a microchip), the well-established greed and untrustworthiness of "Big Pharma," the reports of fetal remains being used in the vaccine creation process and perhaps in the vaccines themselves, the emerging dystopian "Great Reset" plans of the global elites, and the horror stories of proven COVID-19 side-effects from the initial human trials.
Compounding our anxieties in this matter is the massive cover-up of data on COVID-19 death rates, the truth of which (were it known by the general public) would largely neutralize the fear-based motivation and justification for the vaccine. One need only consider that even the highest-risk category of Americans (those over 70 years old) have a 99.5% survival rate and that the total death rate of the nation (from all causes) in 2020 is statistically no higher than prior years.
This disease is not only not a modern version of the bubonic plague, but is far, far less lethal for children and young people than the flu. And in terms of overall public health, it has done virtually nothing but shift the body counts of dead people from, for example, the heart disease and pneumonia columns to the COVID-19 column in the data-reporting process. And, increasingly, to the suicide column, now inflated due to incessant soul-draining media fear-mongering to emotionally vulnerable lockdown victims.
Trump has pledged not to mandate the vaccine, but you can assume Biden will, regardless of what he says now, if the ongoing coup d'etat of the Purple Revolution steals the presidency for him.
I am not opposed to vaccines, per se, but as a Christian and a constitutionalist I am strongly opposed to government health mandates of any kind that purport to supersede my sovereign right under God to the control of my own body. It is my choice whether to seek or accept any health remedy or procedure regardless of the opinion of government officials.
[...]
More importantly, personal bodily sovereignty is a core biblical tenet, and, therefore, as a Christian attorney and the founding pastor of First Century Bible Church, I have drafted a policy against vaccine mandates and posted it on our church website as our official doctrine.
CNS Joins MRC Parent In Attacking Warnock Topic: CNSNews.com
Following in the footsteps of its Media Research Center parent, the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, also went on the attack against Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock.
CNS managing editor and Franklin Graham fanboy Michael W. Chapman repeated Graham's attack on Warnock over abortion, declaring that he "champions the killing of babies in the safety of a mother’s womb through abortion." In a Dec. 7 article, Patrick Goodenough returned to the issue, highlighting how "the contrast in their views on abortion was on full display" in TV appearances by Warnock and his Republican opponent,Kelly Loeffler -- but, unusually, he did fact-check Loeffler by noting that she falsely claimed that Warnock invoked the Bible when defending a woman's right to choose (but, in more typical CNS style, this wasn't the headline claim). Two days later, though, Craig Bannister hyped right-wing activist Alveda King's claim that "I wish Rev. Warnock would read the Bible for real" on the subject of abortion.
A Dec. 16 article by Goodenough featured right-wing attacks on Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running for Georgia's other Senate seat, claiming that "ceding Republican control of the Senate would pave the way for an agenda of creeping socialism, Supreme Court packing, and attacks on religious freedom." On Dec. 21, Goodenough took offense to Warnock's claim thatAmerica was not only fighting COVID-19 but systemic racism, which he called "COVID-1619." Goodenough ramped up the prudishness over rappers supporting Warnock and Ossoff in a Dec. 28 article:
An Atlanta rapper whose sexually-explicit lyrics leave nothing to the imagination campaigned on behalf of Georgia Democratic Senate hopefuls Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock on Monday, urging voters to “paint Georgia blue” and “get both of those Senate seats.”
Performing at a campaign drive-in concert in the parking lot of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., BRS Kash changed the title of his song, “Throat Baby” to “Vote Baby,” and adapted some of the other lyrics.
“I love the way you walk, love the way you talk, Let a young n**** come play in your throat,” became “I love the way you walk, love the way you talk, let’s all go walk to the polls.”
After performing, BRS Kash said, “Hey if you wanna make a change, early election has already started. I need everybody to go vote by January 5. We need to paint Georgia blue, we need to get both of those Senate seats. So I need everybody to go vote for Jon Ossoff and Reverend Warnock.”
The lyrics of “Throat Baby” are too graphic to reproduce here, but include offensive terms for women and blacks, along with explicit references to sexual activity, genitalia, and bodily fluids.
Chapman returned on Dec. 30 for more fanboying over Graham, regurgitating his claim that "the soul of the nation is at stake" in the Georgia runoff election.
Oppo Research: MRC Helps Ga. GOP Senate Candidate By Attacking Opponent Topic: Media Research Center
Just like it did with the Trump campaign, the Media Research Center got its marching orders from Republican leadership: Go on the attack against Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidate in one of the two Georgia Senate runoff races. And Warnock was very much targeted: A search of the NewsBusters archive found a whopping 46 articles that referenced Warnock between the Nov. 3 election and press time, compared with 35 articles referencing Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in the other Georgia runoff race.
The MRC got started early with making misleading and nit-picky attacks on Warnock. That was followed by a Dec. 9 post by Gabriel Hays parroting "serious conservatives and Christians" bashing Warnockfor not hating abortion enough:
If there was one thing that could make it obvious that Democrat Senate candidate Raphael Warnock is a terrible choice for U.S. Senator, it would be one of his most recent tweets proclaiming himself a pro-choice Christian. Talk about living with cognitive dissonance.
First off, supporting the killing of unborn babies is a non-starter, as is openly admitting you’re a hypocrite by saying you’re Christian and then saying you ignore fundamental parts of Christian teaching.
Warnock, a Baptist “pastor” and radical, pro-BLM, pro-abortion leftist vying for one of two U.S. Senate seats in the upcoming Georgia run-off elections, went afoul of conservatives on Twitter in recent days by declaring himself to be proudly pro-choice and Christian.
(This echoed in part a Nov. 20 column by Tim Graham whining that conservatives were being called out for attacking Warnock's religion but tended to cry discrimination when liberals criticized the extreme religious views of their fellow conservatives.)
On Dec. 17, Kristine Marsh tried to make a big deal out of saying that Fidel Castro's legacy as Cuban dictator is "complex" as most people's legacies are, and that Castro spoke at a church 25 years ago where Warnock was youth pastor (though there's no evidence Warnock played any role in the visit).
The perpetually ragey Nicholas Fondacaro thought he had the key to destroying Warnock's campaign in a Dec. 22 post:
Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock apparently got an early piece of coal in his stocking on Christmas week. According to police body camera footage exclusively aired on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday, the radical leftist pastor was accused by his ex-wife of running over her foot with his car as she tried to stop him from driving off with their kids, last March.
The video was stunning and featured Warnock himself talking with the responding Atlanta police officer, but will any of the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, or NBC) share it with their viewers on Wednesday?
[...]
The incident raised deep concerns and questions about his temperament and actions that needed to be probed by the media. Unfortunately, the press was more interested in helping Democrats win control of the Senate no matter who the candidates were.
Fondacaro buried the fact that officers on scene found no apparent injury on the ex's foot and that Warnock was never charged. And his complaint is doubly ironic given that neither Fondacaro nor anyone else at the MRC told their readers that the Staten Island bar owner they lionized for standing up to purportedly draconian coronavirus lockdown restrictions actually did run over someone with his car: a sheriff's deputy. Nevertheless, Fondacaro returned the next day to rant that non-right-wing networks didn't cover the minor dispute.
Then -- as if he was on the payroll as opposition researcher for Warnock's Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler -- Fondacaro served up another Warnock attack on Dec. 28:
Even with new reporting from the Washington Free Beacon out Monday that detailed how, in 2002, a then 12-year-old boy was abused at a church camp overseen by future Senate Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront continued to be a staunch defender. Instead of reporting on the account of abuse victim Anthony Washington, senior national correspondent Kyung Lah defended Warnock’s radical sermons from Republican “attacks.”
Throughout the 2020 election cycle, numerous videos had surfaced of Warnock preaching radical leftist ideology from his pulpit. And as National Review published in mid-November, it was off the wall stuff. Warnock accused Israel of being like “apartheid South Africa,” described Israelis as “birds of prey” in a letter, and gave a speech praising Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon.
[...]
And according to a Maryland state trooper investigating the abuse claims, Warnock was arrested for trying to obstruct justice by interfering with the questioning of camp counselors. Though, the charge was later dropped.
The story has been a key Loeffler campaign talking point, hence Fondacaro's glomming onto it. He censored the fact that law enforcement found Warnock to be "very helpful" with the investigation into the camp, blaming miscommunication for the arrest; Warnock said he interrupted a law enforcement interview of a counselor to make sure the counselor had legal representation.
Despite the fact he censored key exculpatory aspects of the story that interfered with his narrative, Fondacaro hypocritically lectured: "If CNN was going to do a report defending Warnock’s time as a church official, then they needed to take responsibility and report on his abusive camp. In this instance, the situation wasn’t political at all. It was about his time overseeing a camp that abused children and his alleged attempt to obstruct justice."
The next day, Joseph Vazquez served up his own attack on Warnock, invoking all the key right-wing buzzwords:
Outsiders are funding nearly the entire cost of Georgia’s Democrat Senate candidates Jon Ossoff’s and Rev. Raphael Warnock’s campaigns, a new report said.
This is the same Fidel Castro-sympathizing Warnock who referred to himself as a “pro-choice pastor,” and the same Ossoff who has ties to Communist China. Warnock, in particular, had also disparaged service in the U.S. military, telling church parishioners in 2011, “America, nobody can serve God and the military.” Oh, and let’s not forget that Warnock also has a record of spewing anti-Semitic hate at Israel.
Of the $100 million each that the two leftist candidates have hauled in the last two months, “95 percent of that money is coming from outside of the Peach State,” according to the New York Post. The biggest financial backers reportedly are based in “the Democratic strongholds of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.”
Again, this was a hypocritical attack. Vazquez was silent on the source of Loeffler's donations, and there was a reason: She and her fellow GOP Senate runoff candidate, David Perdue, received 92 percent of donations from out of state, nuch of it from, yes, California, Texas and Florida.
Are all these explicitly political attacks in line with the MRC's nonprofit status, which forbids explicit political activity? One has to wonder.
Newsmax Columnist Calls Biden A 'Manchurian President' Topic: Newsmax
Calling someone a "Manchurian candidate" has been a reliable form of attack by right-wingers against political candidates they don't like. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and even John McCain have been portrayed as one. Right-wing lawyer Michael Dorstewitz, in his Dec. 14 Newsmax column, is now arguing that Joe Biden is one:
Life imitates art. "The Manchurian Candidate" was a 1962 political thriller that depicted an American soldier who was captured during the Korean War. He was brainwashed to later assassinate a political figure as part of an international Communist conspiracy.
In this case former Vice President Joe Biden wasn't brainwashed — he's a willing participant. And the assassination isn't of a political figure but of the United States.
Biden will most certainly reverse the Trump administration's policy of holding the Chinese Communist Party responsible for its past misdeeds, either by underestimating the threat that China presents, or out of a desire for monetary gain. He'll allow China to increase its influence on the United States and would permit manufacturing to migrate back to China, taking American jobs with it.
[...]
Today, the Electoral College meets to officially elect the president. Biden is expected to receive 306 votes; Trump, 232.
Assuming that holds until the January 20 Inauguration Day, the Manchurian President will be sleeping in White House that night.
That's not the only attack Dorstewitz has launched against Biden. In his Dec. 23 column, he attacked Biden's religious faith:
But it’s one thing to spend an hour in church once a week. It’s another thing altogether to actually live your faith, and with Biden, it’s all showboating. In reality, Biden’s neither honorable nor devout.
Biden has aligned with his party’s stance on abortion for decades, notwithstanding the church’s belief that life begins at conception, and destroying that life is murder. He at least supported the Hyde Amendment for decades, which in most cases prevents public funds from being used to pay for abortions.
But that fell by the wayside last year when he realized he had to fall in line if he had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. A desire for power trumped adherence to his faith.
Dorstewitz even brought up petty, nearly 50-year-old attacks on how Biden met his wife, Jill, first advanced by her bitter first husband and later promoted by the Media Research Center.
If Joe Biden has his way, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms could be nearly legislated out of existence.
And that would have the blessing of the Communist Party of China.
The New York Post’s Nels Frye observed back in March that President Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic of China were rooting for former Vice President Joe Biden to emerge victorious in November’s general election.
WND Defends The Honor Of the Proud Boys -- Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
Back in October, WorldNetDaily responded to presidential debate remarks about whether the far-right thugs in the Proud Boys are white supremacists by pointing out that national leader of the group, Enrique Tarrio, is "a black-Hispanic American" who denies any white supremacist motives. Not only is that not true, there is a Proud Boys faction that is quite proud to be white supremacist and anti-Semitic.
Nevertheless, WND felt the need to defend the honor of the Proud Boys once again. In a Nov. 20 article, Matt Keener wrote about how he "talked with Enrique Tarrio – the Afro-Cuban leader of Proud Boys – on camera about how his group became a lightning rod in the 2020 election" during a trip to the Million MAGA March:
Aside from that, if your only familiarity with the group is Chris Wallace and Joe Biden teaming up to ask the president to condemn white supremacy yet again, specifically the Proud Boys, during the first debate, then there is one thing that immediately comes to your attention when you see this "white supremacist" group.
There are quite a few people of color in their ranks.
Indeed, as I approached Tarrio, he was joking around, apparently drinking a beer and hugging a fellow group member who is black.
I spoke with Tarrio on camera about how on earth the Proud Boys came to be a focal point of this year's election.
Keener gave Tarrio a pass in letting him handwave the group's history of violence:
Tarrio pulls no punches when asked about how the Proud Boys are portrayed or if they are misunderstood.
"We're not this violent f–ing group of guys – we're not. Can we be violent?" he asks rhetorically. "Absolutely so. Are we good at self-defense? Yes sir. But we don't – we had 250 Proud Boys on the streets today. But they didn't board up businesses because we came into town. They're boarding up businesses when the left are the ones that get together."
Tarrio explained how he handles the perception or claims they are a white supremacist or hate group.
"I'm not concerned about the people that hate us or call us white supremacists. I really don't give a s–t about them. All right? Because they're not reasonable. So I don't try to reason with them. I don't try to argue with them. I avoid them," he says, before adding, "The people that don't know who we are – or somebody that thinks that we're something but isn't 100% sure? Those people I reach out to. Because we're not a white supremacist group."
What Keener isn't going to tell you is that the Proud Boys are, indeed, a violence-driven group. Since then, Tarrio admitted to burning a Black Lives Matter banner he stole from a church during a December march, and he falsely claimed he was invited to the White House (turns out he just took the regular public tour).
All this stuff was interspersed with rants from Keener like this:
You can call yourself "woke," but if you are canceling, censoring, eliminating, or assaulting someone based on who they voted for, you are misguided. It is you who is the oppressor.
You can call the Proud Boys white supremacist, but the leader of the group and several members are black and brown. I saw them with my own eyes.
The media manipulate and lie to you.
Look around. Use your eyes.
The emperor has no clothes.
And no one wants to say it.
Keener has a bright future as a WND columnist ... if WND survives that long, anyway.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC Division Of The Trump Campaign, Part 1 Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center was such a devoted Trump apologist and promoter, it may as well have been on the payroll. Read more >>
What Is The MRC Trying To Hide In Its War On 'Big Tech'? Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center huffed in a Dec. 18 press release:
MRC President L. Brent Bozell denounces Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) for aiding Big Tech companies in their fight to suppress and restrict conservative content. AFPF filed a lawsuit, following a FOIA request, for communications between the Department of Commerce and conservatives working to stop Big Tech from unjustly censoring conservative content. The Media Research Center, Bozell, and MRC VP Dan Gainor were all specifically named.
"AFPF backed off naming groups and leaders after strong pushback for their efforts, but what is done is done. The Koch machine has shown its true colors,” said Bozell. “Koch and AFP should do the honest thing and disclose their agenda. Koch also launched a multi-million dollar venture with George Soros.
“Section 230 must be reformed to stop the abuse of conservatives by Big Tech. That’s our position. It’s the essence of free speech and free enterprise. The Koch machine believes in neither. They’re supporting massive monopolies while also snooping about to read others’ private emails. What they’re doing smells to high heaven. They should just admit they’re doing the bidding of Big Tech, and we’ll all know where they stand,” Bozell concluded.
Weird how Bozell and the MRC are suddenly concerned about the content of "private emails" when it spent years salivating over Hillary Clinton's leaked private emails and Peter Strzok's private texts. If the MRC did nothing wrong and all of its lobbying to change Section 230 was above board, it shouldn't be bothered by anyone's "snooping." What are Bozell, Gainor and the MRC trying to hide?
Also: The AFPF's original FOIA request was made back in September. Why did the MRC wait three months to complain about it? Presumably because there was an article in the Washington Times two days before Bozell's rant noting that the AFPF filed a full lawsuit against the Commerce Department becuase it wouldn't release those emails.
Also curious is that the MRC is specifically lashing out a prominent funder of conservative causes. this is likely driven by the fact that it doesn't get much funding from Koch-related foundations -- just $15,000 in recent years, according to one count. It linked to another reason: a July 2019 MRC post complaining that Charles Koch is cooperating with hated liberal boogeyman George Soroson something called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the creation of which was driven in part by U.S. emphasis on military force over diplomacy and "the foreign policy establishment is ill-equipped to interpret what was happening, particularly the foreign policy of Donald Trump." Writer Joseph Vazquez -- the MRC's designated Soros fearmongerer -- rehashed that "An MRC Special Report proved that 'In just 10 years, Soros has given more than $550 million to liberal organizations in the United States. And that's really just a beginning. That total represents about 27 percent of the $2 billion given out by the American branches of his Open Society Foundations from 2000 to 2009.'" Besides, the MRC has its own right-wing funders in the form of the Mercer family.
As the old saying goes: If you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing. The MRC is very much acting like it has something to hide. It had noproblem with the release of Hillary Clinton's emails or Strzok's texts, so it should have no problem with the release of its own emails for the purposes of full transparency on an issue in which it is heavily involved.
CNS Columnist: Blacks, Hispanics Don't Deserve Early Access to COVID-19 Vaccine Topic: CNSNews.com
Hans Bader complained in a Dec. 10 CNSNews.com column:
The Department of Veterans Affairs is going to give priority to black and Hispanic veterans over white and Asian veterans when administering the vaccine for COVID-19. This racial preference is unconstitutional.
The VA is doing this because it thinks blacks and Hispanics are at greater risk. But these minorities are not inherently at greater risk of contracting the virus. There is nothing special about their genes that puts them in danger. It is just that their jobs, neighborhoods, and backgrounds tend to put them in more frequent contact with people who already carry COVID-19. So it is those characteristics -- not race -- that the VA can legally consider in handing out the vaccine to veterans. As the Supreme Court explained in Bartlett v. Strickland (2009), the government is supposed to use race only as a "last resort." That's true even when it has a better reason for using race than the VA has -- like addressing a history of past governmental discrimination against a minority group.
Yes, Bader is really arguing that. But at no point does he offer evidence that blacks and Hispanics are "not inherently at greater risk of contracting the virus" despite the fact that it's indisputably true that Blacks and Hispanics have risk factors that lead to them catching and dying from COVID-19.
Bader went into denial on this point, dismissing it all as societal, saying it's effectively their fault that they're more exposed to catching it:
But generally speaking, the fact that a group has been disproportionately affected is not a reason for giving the group a racial preference, even if the disproportionate impact is from a government policy -- rather than, as is the case for most black and Hispanic people who have contracted COVID, from societal factors that put them into more frequent contact with COVID carriers.
The Supreme Court has ruled that "societal discrimination" against a minority group is not a valid reason for giving priority to members of that group. (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)). So even if black and Hispanic people experience discrimination that shunts them into lower-paying jobs with increased risk of catching the coronavirus, that wouldn't be reason enough for the VA to give them a racial preference.
[...]
So the fact that "some groups of people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19" is not a reason to give such groups priority in access to the vaccine, based on their race.
The VA may argue that it is OK to consider veterans' race because it is only doing so as one of several factors, such as age and existing health problems. But giving a racial preference is presumptively unconstitutional, even when race is just one of many factors being used by a government agency and there are special reasons for it to prize racial diversity.
Curiously, Bader doesn't offer a plan to reduce the way Blacks and Hispanics are "disproportionately affected" by coronavirus, despite his framing as merely a societal problem; he simply rants that they don't deserve to cut the line in front of him. Not exactly the smartest hill for him to choose to die on.
Rich Noyes' False Conflation Station Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Rich Noyes writes in a Dec. 11 post:
Every four years since 2000, the online opinion site Slate lets readers see how their staff has voted in the presidential election. It’s a commendable exercise in transparency, especially in a profession where many journalists invariably promote liberal politicians and liberal viewpoints, only to deny their work is influenced by their opinions.
This year, the survey found, not a single Slate staffer voted for President Trump, even though more than 74,200,000 other Americans did — a record haul for a Republican nominee. That compares with 56 staffers who said they voted for Joe Biden (98%), one who picked Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins (2%), and one intern who as of November 2 still hadn’t made up her mind between Hawkins and Biden.
Four years ago, the staff poll showed a similar tilt: 59 votes (97%) for Democrat Hillary Clinton, one for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, one write-in vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin, and none for Donald Trump.
The question is whether Slate is indicative of the broader liberal media establishment.
Stop right there. Noyes already identified Slate as an "opinion site" -- meaning writers are permitted to put their opinions in writing -- so it's irrelevant and misleading to compare it with the "liberal media establishment," which is more focused on news and, despite Noyes' mocking, you are allowed to hold personal political opinions that do not necessarily show themselves in reporting.
But Noyes is determined to falsely conflate the two:
Looking at their coverage, it’s hard to imagine anyone at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC or any of the broadcast networks voting for Trump, ever. And let’s not forget that Joe Biden won 93% of this year’s newspaper endorsements, vs. just seven percent for Trump.
We can also compare Slate’s tally with surveys of journalists conducted by a variety of scholars and organizations over the past several decades. While some surveyed elite journalists, and others looked at a wider sample that included small-town newspapers, these polls invariably found a massive gap between the media and the public.
Ah, yes, the journalist surveys. The most notorious of these that the MRC has touted over the years was one that found 89 percent of reporters covering the federal government voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. We wrote about this study 20 years ago, and it was highly flawed and skewed; conservative journals were largely excluded, national outlets were a small percentage of respondents, and the bulk were actually from regional newspapers who are focused on covering issues for their local readers and not catering to a national audience.
Aas for Noyes' complaint that "not a single Slate staffer voted for President Trump, even though more than 74,200,000 other Americans did": We can assume that no MRC employee (including those who work for its "news" division, CNSNews.com) voted for Biden though more than 81 million other Americans did -- a record haul for any presidential candidate. Doesn't that mean the MRC is as out of touch as Noyes wants you to believe Slate is?
Of course, Noyes will never hold its employees to the same standard it holds Slate -- nor will he release an official tally of how he and his fellow MRC employees voted. The MRC is strictly a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type of operation.
Patrice Lewis began her Dec. 11 WorldNetDaily column by stating, "I'm going to be quoting a lot of sources in this column rather than writing much original content. That's because there are so many others saying things better than I can." Unfortunately, most of those sources are fringe-right conspiracy websites ranting about the coronavirus pandemic and asserting that all the chaos surrounding it has been planned, because this is the conclusion she came to:
Make no mistake, we're in the throes of an orchestrated economic collapse. Orchestrated. Got that? Orchestrated. It's not about controlling a virus; it's about controlling people. Even Rush Limbaugh is calling this a "plandemic."
One person commented: "I remember thinking when the lockdowns started – don't they know this is going to destroy the economy? And then reality hit me, and I knew that this is their end game and that it's all been planned."
[...]
"Science," in other words, usually means whatever a political tyrant wants it to mean. We all know Trump rallies are "superspreader" events, but BLM or Antifa protests or Biden celebrations are fine, just fine.
Lewis then described the economic fallout for her business: "Our wholesale woodcraft business that has supported us for nearly 30 years absolutely tanked during 2020. Thirty years of building up a business, and now it's gone." After citing a few more fringe people, Lewis concluded: "OK, my rant is over. But the economic misery for millions of people continues. Folks, the pain isn't worth the cost."
Strangely, Lewis never identifies who specifically is behind this conspiracy beyond a shadowy "they."
Tim Graham's Double Standard On October Surprises Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spent his Dec. 11 column whining that the right-wing hit job on Hunter Biden -- which the MRC has gleefully embraced -- was dismissed outside the right-wing media bubble as nothing more than a dirt-digging expedition:
Hunter Biden only survives "difficult challenges" and "emerges stronger" through the energetic strangling of his lobbying scandals by the mainstream media.
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Add the spin in The New York Times' front-page headline the Sunday before Election Day: "Foiled Once, Giuliani's Team Peddles More Dirt." There were three photographs in the story: one of President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and one of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. The story focused much more on their machinations than on Hunter's.
One could just as easily demonize the daily output of The Times in a similar way by referencing The Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in a headline: "Foiled in 2016, Sulzberger's Team Peddles More Dirt on the Trumps."
Our media elite pretend that they're all for the free and democratic exchange of information, and for holding powerful people accountable. But the suppressed Hunter Biden scandal story underlines that they have been shaming anti-Democratic narratives by engaging in character assassination of the conservative media.
This is all projection, of course -- what he's accusing the "liberal media" of doing on Hunter Biden is exactly what the MRC did for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
While Graham complained that the Times pointed out how strategists close to Trump conspired with the New York Post to push the Hunter Biden story, things were much different when a tape of Trump disparaging women was released during the 2016 election. Graham's boss, Brent Bozell, rushed to Trump's defense by attacking NBC (which produced "Access Hollywood," the show where Trump made the off-the-record remarks) for allegedly sitting on the Trump tape and that "the timing was deliberate" for its release.
Graham himself worked to dismiss the story, complaining about "the ongoing obsession with women charging Donald Trump with sexual harassment." Graham and Bozell huffed in a column, "They say it was a recent discovery. No media October Surprise there, no siree," then changed the subject to the womanizing of Bill Clinton, who was not running in 2016.Graham also complained: "NBC and other liberal networks are politically savvy enough to know cynics will not believe you when you claim you suddenly discovered something touted as a political silver bullet with just a few weeks to go in the campaign. But that’s what they’re claiming."
Bozell later ranted, "What NBC has done is a direct threat to the democratic process and evidence of what conservatives have been saying all along. A network that purports to hold itself up as an objective news source while at the same time attempts to fix an election has lost all credibility. NBC must take responsibility, apologize to Donald Trump, and fire whoever was behind the strategic release of this tape."
Graham has never complained about the manufacted October-surprise aspect of the Hunter Biden, despite the fact that it had been floating around right-wing circles for over a year before the Post agreed to publish it. Graham and Bozell will not be calling for the New York Post to take responsibility, apologize to the Bidens and fire whoever was involved in the reporting of the story (though the lead reporter was embararassed enough by the story that he wouldn't put his byline on it).
Graham is nothing but a rank hypocrite. He will always give right-wing media a pass on things he attacks the "liberal media" for doing.
CNS Heathers Fox's Wallace Over "President-Elect" Term, Mask-Wearing Topic: CNSNews.com
Fox News host Chris Wallace has been a target of Heathering by the Media Research Center over the past year for lacking total obsequience to President Trump. Now the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, has gotten in on it. Patrick Goodenough complained in a Dec. 6 article:
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace took issue with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during an interview Sunday for referring to “Vice President Joe Biden,” making the point three times that he should use the term “president-elect.”
Wallace also took the opportunity to criticize President Trump for an early lack of enthusiasm about mask wearing.
“If President Trump had worn a mask then and urged everyone to wear a mask then, back in April, the way Joe Biden is right now, wouldn’t we be in much better shape?” he asked.
Goodenough was quick to make an excuse for the latter -- "The World Health Organization (WHO) itself advised against mass mask wearing until June" -- but after complaining that Wallace "chided" Azar "for the third time" over the "president-elect" statement, he seemed to suggest Wallace wasn't totally wrong on the historyof the term:
Biden is the projected president-elect until the U.S. Congress on January 6 formally counts the electoral votes cast by the electoral college on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December – Dec. 14 in 2020.
The term “president-elect” has traditionally been used, informally, much earlier in the process. Trump changed his Twitter bio to “president elect” on November 9, 2016 – a day after the election – after media projected his electoral college victory.
Biden changed the beginning portion of his Twitter bio from “Senator, Vice President, 2020 candidate for President of the United States” to “President-elect” on November 7, on the day when CNN, followed by other outlets, projected that he would win Pennsylvania, and with it the presidency. Compared to the significant legal disputes in 2020, there were relatively minor disputes and recall counts in 2016.
Goodenough then went after Wallace for allegedly misleading about mask-wearing after he aired clips noting Trump's early callousness toward the practice, going on to nit-pick: "The two clips aired by Wallace gave the misleading impression that CDC Director Robert Redfield had announced the new mask wearing advice on April 3, with Trump then reacting to it. In fact, it was Trump who made the announcement, at a briefing of the White House coronavirus taskforce. The comment from Redfield in the clip played by Wallace, came an hour and two minutes later."
Goodenough then defended Trump's failure to wear a mask by citing evolving WHO guidance:
While critics stress the need to “follow the science” on mask wearing, the WHO itself advised against the general practice until June, arguing that it would encourage a false sense of security and deprive health staff treating COVID-19 patients of badly needed personal protective equipment.
Medical advice around the world on dealing with the novel coronavirus was evolving over time, as experts learned more about how the respiratory pathogen spread. Trump and his supporters are frequently accused of politicizing mask wearing; in fairness, people on both sides have done so.
[...]
Only on June 5 did WHO start advising – “in light of evolving evidence” – that people should be encouraged to wear masks “where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.”
And even then, the global health agency noted, “At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”
At the end of his article, Goodenough linked to an October article which he nit-picked Biden for saying he was wearing masks "from March on" when experts and "the science" advised it, huffing that "In fact public health authorities in the U.S. only issued guidance recommending mask wearing in public on April 3, and the World Health Organization (WHO) held off on doing so until early June" and following that with a lengthy "timeline of the evolving public health advice on mask wearing."
Goodenough has policed the accuracy of Biden's statements much more closely than he has Trump's.
Smirky Newsmax columnist James Hirsen has become quite enamored of bogus right-wing election-fraud conspiracies, and that hasn't really stopped. We've noted his Dec. 7 column likening the election to a bank heist, but he's done more of that.
Remember the 
The Media Research Center's Alexander Hall complained in a Nov. 20 
One of the most troubling questions about our very near future as Americans is whether our state or the federal government will mandate a COVID-19 vaccine – either by a clear government dictate like the lockdown policies or by coercive measures in cooperation with leftist-controlled private companies to make refusal to "voluntarily" vaccinate so onerous as to force compliance.
Following in the footsteps of its 
Just like it did with the 
Calling someone a "Manchurian candidate" has been a reliable form of attack by right-wingers against political candidates they don't like. 
Back in October, WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center huffed in a Dec. 18 
Hans Bader complained in a Dec. 10 CNSNews.com 
The Media Research Center's Rich Noyes writes in a Dec. 11 
Patrice Lewis began her Dec. 11 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spent his Dec. 11 
Fox News host Chris Wallace has been a 
